JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

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2 yr. ago

I was waiting for this! Debian is great. I used it for years. But IMO it's not polished enough for normies. The website is fugly and the onboarding funnel assumes too much knowledge. The installer, last time I tried it, was glitchy and unintuitive. I think that techies underestimate how offputting even ostensibly minor issues like this will be to ordinary users. Also, Debian has a ton of unmaintained packages (altho I gather that something is being done about this). Debian is fundamentally amateur in the best and unfortunately worst senses. I think a Linux flagship distro needs to be more pro and systematically thought out. For that, it's always going to help to have a big company or organization behind it.

Exactly. But I would go further. I think Linux needs flagship distros with big solid institutions behind them, and it needs us to support those distros by using them. I know this is not an popular opinion here.

I see those flagship distros precisely as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Funny. I do exactly the opposite for the exact same reason but inverted. I.e., turn the temperature up to unbearably hot for the last 30 seconds. That way, the cold air comes as a relief and you're functionally shielded from discomfort for the time it takes to get dry and covered.

There must be a lot of dumbbells in the world if this is counterintuitive. It's smart.

Well then you haven't been following it closely. As someone else said, the reason is simple: the Snap version is more recent (like it or not) and in Ubuntu apt is configured to take into account Snap packages.

Exactly. Enough with the inane conspiracism.

Because not everyone wants to spend their time babysitting an OS and Ubuntu has a 20-year track record of dependability.

the acounced Tarrifs

In case people are wondering, this was an 80s Moroccan rock band. I'm a fan.

Yes, this is the alternative. And it's a PITA as you say. And might not even be possible in the future, given the trend towards locking down Android and OSs in general.

The people you know are not representative of the world population, and becoming even less so every day.

Obsessing about this increasingly irrelevant figure is pointless. Most people do not even have desktop computers outside work, and the number is going to keep dropping and dropping. The world has moved to mobile.

As Linux nerds who care about the future of free personal computing, we need to reboot our minds and focus on how to get free software onto mobile devices and into mobile applications.

The FOSS Linux stack is going nowhere on mobile (I have speaking rights here: I once bought an Ubuntu phone). Our last best hope is web apps that use web standards. I say we transfer our obsession to that project instead, rather than worry about this distraction of a statistic.

But it's a free Europe-based provider that's not US big tech. A better suggestion?

To be clear, I use a paid service (Mailbox.org) for my main email, as everyone should do.

I usually refer to England as Great Brittan? Is that generally preferred?

No, because it's wrong!

• Great Britain = England + Scotland + Wales
• UK = Great Britain + Northern Ireland
• British = citizen of (careful!) UK

You're welcome.

Are there many Spanish speakers in Great Brittan?

Far fewer than there are English speakers.

They are right. Terminology is important in this discussion.

It's considered a good idea because it runs over omnipresent, already-existent, distributed infrastructure. In other words, for this particular chat app, you don't even need to create an account. That is at very least an interesting and noteworthy feature.

some issues with many email providers

This turned out to be the deal-breaker for me. GMX kept locking me out of my account because of the DeltaChat messages. They're (of course) full of cyphertext and to email providers this must look a look like spam.

The open-to-abuse nature of email claims yet another victim.

From the UK originally, which is complicated enough. To foreigners I tend to say "England", which (a) is true and (b) everyone understands. But I consider myself British, not English, and certain not a "UK person" (ugh).

I speak French near-natively from having lived there for a big chunk of my life. Spanish: intermediate, because it's like French. German: got an A at GCSE decades ago, so not very good. Tried learning Russian a few years ago and, wow, that was hard. I cannot speak Russian. But being able to decipher the Cyrillic script is definitely a cool party trick.

Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend

Firstly, updating the articles is the one thing Wikipedia doesn't do, the army of unpaid volunteers does that.

But as for "just maintaining the backend", the Wikimedia Foundation does far more than that. It created and maintains and constantly iterates a huge pile of ever-complexifying frontend code - the wiki itself, discussion software, media tools etc - not just for Wikipedia but for a whole bunch of peer sites. Much of it is pretty cutting-edge, it's used daily by many thousands of editors and there's also the accessibility requirement. I know from personal experience that there's nothing harder than front-end when you have to tick the accessibility box. No doubt Firefox's technical challenge is greater but really the difference is not night and day.

Yes yes I know all that. Prescriptivism is bad, tut tut!, a serious linguist only describes language, etc etc.

But whether it was 400 years ago or yesterday, to me personally it's thunderingly obvious that "step" comes from a mishearing, all while being inferior in every way. It's even tautological, since the "foot" is already implied in the word "step". It's like saying "He was hand-clutching a bag". One is short, logical, and respects grammatical convention. The other... isn't and doesn't.

Occasionally great new coinings come about from mishearings (can't think of one right now but they exist). This is not one of them.

I keep making the incorrect assumption that everyone

Nicely concise description of bubble-dwelling.